The Shadow Read Online Free Page B

“the recognition of necessity”! But it’s true? Of course! As true as true can be. But oh! with its philosophic highbrowism, how smug! Just plain smug. I know that will annoy you completely, even anger you a little, for haven’t whole books, brilliant and earnest works, been written with this definition as the most marvellous all-round tin-opener of our wonder age? They have indeed. I bow—and glance through my long and, I hope, attractive lashes.
    Lovely on the moor. Lovely, lovely. But I’ll restrict myself, with the economy of the artist, to two pieces of attraction.
    Again, I am happy to say, there was nothing in them. Entirely decorative. The first, a matter of colour and curiosity. It was what made me overdo it, for it lay beyond the moor stream, on the up-slope to the mountains. In such a waste land the colour was quite incredible. Exotic. The heather had not yet come into bloom, and upon its vast dun spaces was set down this one acre of glowing colour. You remember the tone of that yellow chartreuse when you held it against the light? That, then. So I took off my shoes and waded the stream, and on I went.
    Nothing so marvellous as yellow chartreuse, of course! Only the tough hill grass burnt at the tops. Nothing more—except for the spikes, everywhere, rust-coloured rather than withered, of the golden bog asphodel. But when I took one blade of grass, what variety was there, from the fawn-coloured tip, that was the seed, through the brown, the mottled yellow and green, to the green! And I lay down flat in the midst thereof, and the wind blew.
    I got back to the brook, and hung my harp on a salley bush, and did not want to go home. Some day I may tell you what a hill burn says. There are those who say that it tinkles, or even that it sings. But if you care to take it from me—it talks. Please don’t think this is childish. Or—can you get this?—think of it as truly childish. Have you ever heard a child tell you a story it believes in, a strange story? Do you know that curious monotone that comes upon the voice, as if the voice itself and the eyes were far off where the story is happening—but careful, too, lest what was far comes near, and overhears, which would be terrible?
    But I won’t go on. We have, rightly, an awful horror of the grown-up childish. So we avoid it. I chuckle with laughter at the thought of our avoidances. I shake. And the voice of the burn isn’t childish, even in the true way. But oh! it has a monotone. And where we go wrong—I suddenly saw this (it would be far truer to say it was revealed to me, for I did not try to see)—is in trying to personify what cannot be personified. If I were to say that the prehistoric mountain spoke out of this prehistoric burn in the voice of a child—how ridiculous! Saints and mystics may say something like that—that’s why we don’t understand them, even if, for some mysterious reason, we cannot forget them. Their real trouble, I see, is that there are no words for all this. So they make a story of it, a personification, and tell it to us, their children. Us, who know so very much more than they do, us the refugees wrinkled with an age older than the mountains!
    Where are all these words coming from? Who is talking them? You know it can’t be me. (There are long pauses, and such thrills somewhere, but I try to be restrained. I do my best—but it’s difficult when in my vanity I see the rare glow—where? On your face? My pen, absolutely on its own, was going to underline “rare”. Can this be spirit-writing? And how you spurned that! I sway.)
    All the time the pool in the burn was waiting. It wasn’t talking but only looking up at me, not with veiled, lidded eyes, but quite openly. Full of immense age, of course, but no satire. An immensely ancient ledge of grey rock, moor-brown pebbles, and floating foam-flecks from the throat. A pale heather-honey brown